House of God

by Samuel Shem

  During a lull in the conversation my grandfather stood up and said to me, ‘Well, now, Doctor, now I get free advice. Let’s go.’

  We went into my room and sat down, and he said, ‘Nah, I don’ wanna talk with you about advice,’ and he pulled his chair up opposite me and leaned over the way old men do, and I remembered his wife, perenially sitting in back of him, an echo over his shoulder, now dead.

  ‘So you know,’ he said, ‘you’re the oldest grandchild, and I remember the day you were born. I hoid the news in Saratoga. I was president of the Italian American Grocers of Manhattan. We had our convention dere dat year.’

  ‘A Jew as president of the Italian American Grocers?’

  ‘Yeh. The whole t’ing was Jews. You’re an educated man, I’m asking you—would you buy from an Italian? They bought their spaghetti from us. After Polish and Yiddish, next I loined Italian. Den English. Basch’s Italian American Grocery, that was me, then. I got ‘black hand’ letters from the Mafia, the woiks. Even in Kolomea in Poland, we were grocers. My father made all his money during the War with Japan: he bought up hides, and people said to him you’re crazy what you buying these hides for, and he said never mind, and when war came, they needed them hides.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Boots for the soldiers. To get to Japan. Ah, my healt’s not too bad—a little trouble with the legs. But I want to know if I got something bad, ‘cause dese days, dey can cure. I knew dis Italian—Ninth Avenue, nice boy. Oiy did dey cut him—a scar here to here, and here to here. But den, he ran around like a chicken. Not like some people—a little growt, and what do they say? Too busy, too busy. And den bang, dead. I’ll fight like hell to live.’ He paused, and moved closer, until his knees almost touched mine and I could see the little clouds of cataract smothering his eyes. ‘Dat goil of yours she’s a nice goil, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  ‘So what are you waiting? You don’t got another one, do you?’

  I tried not to let on that I had another one.

  ‘So why wait? Be a mensch! I never waited. Sure, you couldn’t wait den, but you know your grandma never wanted to marry me, never? You know what I did? I got a gun, and held it to her head, and I said, Geiger, marry me or I kill you. How about dat, eh?’

  We chuckled, but then he got sad and said, ‘You know, in all dem years with her, I never went with another woman, never. Believe me, chances I had. In Saratoga. Chances plenty.’

  I felt bad about what I was doing with Molly.

  ‘You’re a smart fella. You see people from these Noising Homes all the times, in your hospital, right? Dey bring dem dere?’

  ‘Yes, Gramp, they do.’

  ‘I never wanted to leave Magaw Place, never. I had my Club, my friends. When Grandma died, your father forced me to leave, to dis Home. A man like me in a place like dat. Sure, it’s not bad in some ways—people to play poker, the shul right dere, it’s all right.’

  ‘It’s safe too,’ I said, remembering how he’d gotten mugged.

  ‘Safe? What do I care safe? No, dat don’t worry me. Never did. It’s no good. The noise—we’re in the flight path to Kennedy, would you believe? Dey treat you worse den a dog! All I did, all my life, and now dis. People die every day. It’s a terrible, terrible . . .’

  He started to cry. I felt desperate.

  ‘It’s a bad t’ing, dis. Who visits? Talk to your father, tell him I don’t want to stay dere like an animal. He’ll listen to you. I loved Magaw Place. I’m not a baby, I could have stayed there myself. You remember Magaw Place?’

  ‘Sure, Gramp,’ I said, my mind filled with plush purple couches in a dark vestibule and the creaking metal-slatted elevator and then the childhood thrill of running down the long peculiar-smelling corridor toward Gram and Gramp’s door, which would be thrown open and filled with their embraces. ‘Sure.’

  ‘And your father forced me to move out. So talk to him—dere’s still time for me to move from dat home. Here—a little gelt from me, for your office, Dr. Basch.’

  I took the ten-dollar bill, and sat there as he got up. I knew how terrible it was. My father, adrift with the question of how to handle a single elderly parent, had found his solution in the standard middle-class ethos: ‘ship them to the gomer homes.’ Cattle in boxcars. I was mad. At the time he’d done it, I’d asked him why, and all he’d say was, ‘It’s the best thing for him, he can’t live there alone. The home is nice. We saw it. There are a lot of things there for him to do, and they take care of them there pretty good.’ How much my grandfather had gone through, and how little was left for him now. He would turn into a gomer. I knew, even better than him, where the ride from the nursing home would end. An ominous thought came to me: as he began to get demented, I’d visit him in the home, a syringeful of cyanide like a bar of candy in my pocket. He wouldn’t be a gomer, no.

  We rejoined the others. Things were cheery and bright. My mother, sensing my ambivalence about medicine, marched out a story: ‘You’re never satisfied, Roy. You’re like my great-uncle Thaler, my father’s father’s brother. The whole Thaler family were merchants in Russia—solid steady work, selling cloth, food, I think they even had the whiskey license in the town. But my great-uncle wanted to be a sculptor. Sculptor? Who ever heard of that? They laughed. They told him to be like all the rest. And then once, in the dead of night, he snuck into the barn, stole the best horse, and rode away, and no one ever saw or heard from him again.’

  Several hours later Berry deposited me again outside the doors of the E.W. of the House. As I entered the waiting room at midnight and said hello to Abe, I gave thanks that during Thanksgiving with my family I’d been able to get some sleep.

  The policemen were sitting at the nursing station, as if awaiting my midnight arrival, and Gilheeny boomed out his opener: ‘Happy holiday greetings to you, Dr. Roy, and I expect that in the lap of your family, with your girlfriend in the lovely red Volvo, you have had a wonderful time.’

  I found myself relieved that they were there. I asked whether they’d had a good Thanksgiving as well.

  ‘Red is a fine color,’ said the bushy redhead. ‘There is a continuity to the unconscious processes, at home, at play, at work, according to Freud and resident Cohen, and the continuity of the red of the Thanksgiving cranberry and the potential red of human bloodshed we observe nightly on our beat is pleasing to our senses.’

  ‘This Cohen is talking to you about the unconscious?’ I asked.

  ‘As Freud discovered and as Cohen points out,’ said Quick, ‘the process of free association is liberating, enabling the darkness of the child-policeman to light up with the understanding of the adult. See this lead billy club?’

  I saw it.

  ‘The crack of this lead stick on the elbow is a more sure and fail-safe blow, much to the consternation of those writing TV thrillers,’ said Quick. ‘To crack an elbow with the understanding of the childhood unconscious is almost free of guilt.’

  ‘We have only Cohen to thank,’ said Gilheeny, ‘for teaching the technique of the free association.’

  ‘Cohen and that master of the Jewish race, Freud. And we have high hopes for you, Roy, for like a racehorse, your track record is among the best.’

  ‘You are a man who looks great on paper,’ twitched Gilheeny, ‘humane yet athletic. The Rhodes will of 1903 says, I do believe, to choose “the best men for the world’s fight,” does it not?’

  We were interrupted by a shriek from the Grenade Room:

  GO AVAY GO AVAY GO AVAY . . .

  My heart sank. A room-116 gomere. Even to put on the semblance of a BUFF before TURFING upstairs was, at that point, too much.

  ‘“Do not presume,”’ said Gilheeny, ‘“one of the thieves was killed; do not despair, one of the thieves was saved.”’

  ‘Augustine, of course,’ said Quick.

  ‘Where the hell did you learn that?’ I blurted out, without thinking, and then blushed at the implication that these policemen were just two dumb lunk
y Irishmen.

  ‘Our source for this was a remarkable firebrand of a minuscule Jew. A veritable Herzl,’ said Gilheeny, ignoring my rudeness.

  ‘His name will be familiar, it is inscribed in the hearts of all, and above the lintel of room 116, the room named after him.’

  ‘Grenade Room Dubler?’ I asked.

  ‘The complete intern. Dubler knew all the fundamentals and tricky shortcuts that made him a medical wizard. Without question, in our knowledge of twenty years in God’s House, Dubler was the best.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to hear about him, but I’ve got to see that gomere,’ I said, picking up my bag to go, yet wanting to hear more about this enticing and eccentric Dubler.

  ‘No need, man,’ said Gilheeny, putting a fat hand on mine, ‘no need. We all know her—Ina Goober, an archetype, and we have already put on as much of a BUFF as we could. She is with your pal Chuck at this very moment.’

  ‘You treated her?’ I asked in some amazement.

  ‘She is beyond treatment. She needs nothing but a new nursing-home bed, as hers has been sold. There is no need for you to see her, for she is virtually on her elevator ride up.’

  They were right. Chuck came out of room 116, put his bag down on the desk, and said, ‘Hey, Roy, how you doin’? Great case, eh?’

  ‘Terrific. How’d it go with her?’

  ‘Just great. She thought I was Jackson, the black tern she had last year. Not only that, she sees LeRoy in Outpatient Clinic, and she thinks I’m him too.’

  ‘LeRoy is another person of the black skin color?’ asked Quick.

  ‘No foolin’. So she has us all, and she gets us all confused. That’s OK man, ‘cause I never did meet a gomer who could tell two black doctors apart. You know how it is. So long. An’ be a WALL.’

  ‘Before we hit the beat tonight,’ said Gilheeny, ‘there is time to tell one further story of Grenade Room Dubler. After making ties of axial friendship with us, in repayment for the transfer of knowledge from his brain to ours on an encyclopedic range of subjects, Quick and myself offered to educate your man Dubler in the more pornographic side of our beat. He became excited in the sexual anticipation, and one night we picked him up at midnight at these very doors, telling him that we had arranged for him to do all manner of dirty things with a “woman of the night,” if you get my meaning?’

  ‘The great Gilheeny was at the wheel, and I was in the shotgun seat,’ said Quick, ‘and Dubler in the back, when in the area called the Strip, amidst the sailors and the seamen, we stopped the car and let an acquaintance of ours, one Lulu, jump into the back seat with Dubler. Lulu was the epitome of hot sex and cheap thrills.’

  ‘Instructing Dubler beforehand that he could do anything he wanted with Lulu and that the rearview mirror was not to be used by us, we turned on the radio and drove randomly about, our eyeballs blinking back at the bright lights.’

  ‘Dubler and Lulu began to go at it,’ said Quick. ‘His hand went to a breast, which responded in banner fashion. After much hesitation, the New Jersey Grenade bolstered up the courage to slip a hot hand up under a high skirt. Up and up and up the thigh it went, as we watched in the rearview mirror.’

  ‘Suddenly it hit something hard,’ said Gilheeny, ‘hard and long, in the shape of an erect male organ of the XY-chromosome species.’

  ‘There was a sharp explosion from the little Grenade. We stopped the car, Lulu jumped out one side, Dubler out the other. It was days before we could cease to do the only human thing, laugh.’

  ‘Dubler forgave us, but slowly.’

  ‘And only after we suggested that this had been part of our education of him, since we are, in some sense, textbooks, of a different sort, in ourselves.’

  ‘For what is learning if not the exchange of ideas?’ asked the redhead cheerily. ‘Now we must go. For your willing ear and prospectus of what you might teach us, we will make sure, on your eight-hour shift, that we take all drunks, accidents, gunshots, and abusive hookers away from the House of God and across town to the E.W. at Man’s Best Hospital, MBH. You should have an easy night, and good night.’

  ‘Why do you hang out here instead of at the MBH?’ I asked. ‘And why are you being so nice to me?’

  ‘Man’s Best Hospital is not a friendly place. It is filled with overachievers lacking in the human quality of humor. In an instant it would commit a Crazy Abe. As a Jew, you know it is filled with red-hot and serious Gentiles. As Catholic policemen, we know it is filled with red-hot and serious Protestants. The odd Jewish tern there is a discredit to his roots. We know, for example, that Grenade Room Dubler, as well as yourself, were rejected by MBH for internship slots, in spite of your highest qualities on paper and in the flesh, and each rejected because of your “attitude.”’

  ‘How do you know that much about me?’ I called after them as they were disappearing through the automatic doors, thinking that only the computer that matched me for my ternship knew that I’d listed the MBH ahead of the House of God, and had gotten turned down there. The computer matching was renowned for its secrecy. ‘How come you’re so sure?’

  Gently, wafting back through the whoosh of the closing doors and settling on an imaginary hook in the air as gracefully as a magician’s silk scarf, came their reply:

  ‘Would we be policemen if we were not?’

  12

  Santas were everywhere, punctuating the real world of welfare and mugging with commas of fantasy and remembrance. There was a Salvation Army Santa, a militant clanging his bell in front of the mandatory tubercular trombonist; there was a rich Rubensian pasha of a Santa in a chauffeured Caddy at rush hour; there was even a Santa, a schizoid-looking Santa but a Santa nonetheless, riding a chilly elephant through the park. And of course there was a Santa in the House of God, spritzing joy amidst the horror and the pain.

  The best Santa was the Fat Man. To his gaggle of outpatients in his Clinic, he was a Fat Messiah. Given his brusque manner and raucous laugh, it was a surprise to me to find out how much his patients loved him. One afternoon before Christmas, I was walking with him to our Clinics.

  ‘Sure they love me,’ said Fats, ‘doesn’t everyone? All my life—except for the ones who were jealous—everyone has always loved me. You know the kid in the center of the kids on the playground? The kid whose house the others come over to? Fats in Flatbush, always. So now it’s kids we call “patients.” Same thing. They all love me. It’s great!’

  ‘As crass and as cynical as you are?’

  ‘Who said? And so what?’

  ‘So why do they love you?’

  ‘That’s why: I’m straight with ’em and I make ’em laugh at themselves. Instead of the Leggo’s grim self-righteousness or Putzel’s whimpering hand-holding that makes them feel like they’re about to die, I make them feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases, which, most of the time and especially in the Clinic, don’t hardly exist at all. With me, they feel they’re still part of the human race.’

  ‘But what about your sarcasm?’

  ‘So who isn’t sarcastic? Docs are no different from anyone else, they just pretend they’re different, to feel big. Jesus, I’m worried about this research project, though—you know my trouble?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Conscience. Would you believe it? Even ripping off the federal government at the VA Hospital makes me shiver. It’s loony. I’m only making forty percent of what I could. It’s awful.’

  ‘Too bad,’ I said, and then, as we approached the Clinic, I felt that sinking feeling of having to deal with these husbandless hypertensive LOLs in NAD with their asinine demands for my care, and I groaned.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fats.

  ‘I don’t know if I can stand trying to figure out what to do for these women in my Clinic.’

  ‘Do? You mean you try to do something?’

  ‘Sure, don’t you?’

  ‘Hardly ever. I do my best nothing right in my Clinic.
Wait—don’t go in there yet,’ he said, and pulled me aside, hiding behind the door. ‘See that crowd there?’

  I did. There was a crowd of people in the waiting room, a mélange looking like a bar mitzvah at the United Nations.

  ‘My outpatients. I do nothing medical for them, and they love me. You know how much booze, hot merchandise, and food there’s gonna be in that crowd as Hannukah and Christmas presents for me? And all because I don’t do a goddamn medical thing.’

  ‘You’re telling me again that the cure is worse than the disease?’

  ‘Nope. I’m telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of illness in this world is the doctor’s own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can. It ain’t easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that the body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they’re on the verge of death all the time, and that they’d better get their “routine physical” right away. Physicals! How much have you ever learned from a physical?’